Tradition and Boat Race Both Upended on the Thames

The Cambridge team looked on as a protester disrupted its race with Oxford on Saturday.Credit
Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — It is, in its way, one of Britain’s great anachronisms: a university boat race steeped in pageantry and tradition with nothing but honor at stake, a moment when old buffers in satin-trimmed blazers can revel in upper-crust camaraderie and pretend that the important things in the world remain much as they were when the race was first run in 1829.

But the annual Oxford-Cambridge race along a historic stretch of the Thames in London has become more than a highlight of the sporting calendar. In recent years it has been the occasion for another contest, between those who view it as a grand spectacle and those who condemn it as an emblem of a class- and tradition-bound Britain whose day has passed.

Until this year, both contests were generally fought within what the British call the Marquess of Queensberry rules of fair play. To be sure, the boat race has seen sinkings, annulments, at least one dead heat and two crew mutinies, including one 25 years ago by American oarsmen that provided the plotline for the 1996 movie “True Blue.” And every year in recent times, noisy protesters have thrust their banners at the television cameras that broadcast the race and the festive scene on the riverbank to viewers around the world. But in the end, things had always come off peaceably enough.

Then came Saturday, when the whole affair ended more in frustration and tears than in celebration.

A bit more than halfway down the four-mile course, a bearded Australian in a wetsuit who had posted a 2,000-word essay on the Internet beforehand titled “Elitism Leads to Tyranny” jumped into the river and swam directly into the path of the two boats, which were racing neck and neck. The churning oars of the Oxford boat narrowly missed hitting him, but his presence caused sufficient alarm that the race umpire waved a red flag to halt the contest.

After a half-hour delay, while the protester was hauled out of the river onto a police launch, the race was restarted where it left off, only to have the two boats’ oars tangle almost immediately afterward. The clash took the tip off one of the Oxford rowers’ oars, leaving the crew with just seven effective oarsman out of the starting eight and allowing Cambridge to post an easy four-and-a-half-length victory.

The protester was handcuffed and charged with disturbing public order, and some on the Oxford side complained later that the umpire should have ordered a second restart. But that was not the end of the day’s drama.

In the commotion at the finish line, where the Oxford cox — a 24-year-old British criminology student named Zoe de Toledo, the only woman in the race — shouted in furious protest at the race umpire’s ruling that she had caused the clash of oars by steering too close to the Cambridge boat, minutes went by before anybody realized that Oxford’s leading oarsman had collapsed in his seat in the boat’s bow.

Medics worked to aid the oarsman — Alex Woods, a 27-year-old postgraduate medical student — for half an hour, giving him oxygen and then putting him in an ambulance to Charing Cross Hospital, where he was kept overnight. Doctors said he would recover.

The usual postrace celebrations were abandoned, with no trophy presentation, no speeches and no Champagne. And the Sunday newspapers in Britain wrote with alarm about the risks of the “demonstration effect” of the Australian’s protest for the Olympic Games in London this summer.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Olympic officials plan to deploy 25,000 guards, soldiers and police officers to protect the games, but their focus has been mainly on preventing terrorist attacks; security experts say that it may be a great deal harder to prevent, say, one ticketed spectator with a cause from running onto the track to disrupt a showcase event like the men’s 1,500 meters. Such concerns may play a role in how the British courts handle the boat race protester, legal experts say; he may get a much stiffer jail sentence than most demonstrators who cause no physical harm.

For the moment, though, in the clubs and pubs of Britain, the talk about Saturday’s fiasco has turned largely to the old debate about the boat race. Should it be the subject of so much hoopla and media attention in a contemporary Britain where the old issues of elitism and class privilege have surged anew to the forefront of the political debate?

Recession, unemployment and swollen public debt have been met with harsh austerity measures by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, a wealthy Conservative educated at Eton College — a byword for class privilege — who went on to graduate from Oxford and marry the stepdaughter of a viscount. The Labour opposition has made impressive gains in recent opinion polls by casting the Cameron government’s spending cuts and tax increases as an assault on Britain’s have-nots by an out-of-touch, classbound millionaire elite.

The boat race episode was not without its paradoxes. The quintessentially British character of the race does not deter the two sides — the “light blues” of Cambridge and the “dark blues” of Oxford — from recruiting foreign muscle; of the 18 competitors this year, 11 were non-Britons, including 5 Americans. Meanwhile, the anti-elitism protester in the wetsuit — Trenton Oldfield, 35 — is himself the product of an elite British university, though one with a long list of prominent leftists as alumni: the London School of Economics.

In his blog posting, Mr. Oldfield compared himself to Emily Davison, a suffragette who died after throwing herself in front of a racehorse owned by King George V in 1913, and he said that in his plan to disrupt the boat race with “guerrilla tactics,” his only fear was “not swimming fast enough to get into the right position.”

He complained in the posting that the banks of the Thames between the well-to-do London districts of Kew and Chiswick — roughly the stretch covered by the university boats before he ambushed them — had been entrenched as “a site where elitists and those with elitist sympathies have come together” since the 19th century to “reboot their shared culture in the public realm.”

It was left to an American graduate of Yale who rowed in the Oxford boat on Saturday — William Zeng, a 22-year-old Rhodes scholar from Great Falls, Va., who is studying for a doctorate in computer science — to produce one of the most withering ripostes, in a string of Twitter messages that Mr. Zeng posted shortly after the race. Addressing himself to Mr. Oldfield, he wrote that he had considered what the Australian’s motive might be after having “missed your head with my blade,” and added, “No matter what you say your cause may be, your actions speak too loudly for me to hear you.”

“You were protesting the right of 17 young men and one woman to compete fairly and honorably, to demonstrate their hard work and desire in a proud tradition,” Mr. Zeng wrote. “You, who would make a mockery of their dedication and their courage, are a mockery of a man.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2012, on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Tradition and a Boat Race Alike Are Upended on the Thames. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe